The Foundation Of Troy

ONE story told about the foundation of Troy is that, in time of famine, a third of the Cretan people, commanded by Prince Scamander, set out to found a colony. On reaching Phrygia, they pitched their camp beside the sea, not far from the city of Hamaxitus, below a high mountain which they named Ida in honour of Zeus’s Cretan home. Now, Apollo had advised them to settle wherever they should be attacked by earth-born enemies under cover of darkness; and that same night a horde of famished field mice invaded the tents and nibbled at bow-strings, leather shield-straps, and all other edible parts of the Cretans’ war-gear. Scamander accordingly called a halt, dedicated a temple to Sminthian Apollo (around which the city of Sminthium soon grew) and married the nymph Idaea, who bore him a son, Teucer. With Apollo’s help, the Cretans defeated their new neighbours, the Bebrycians, but in the course of the fighting Scamander had leaped into the river Xanthus, which thereupon took his name. Teucer, after whom the settlers were called Teucrians, succeeded him. Yet some say that Teucer himself led the Cretan immigrants, and was welcomed to Phrygia by Dardanus, who gave him his daughter in marriage and called his own subjects Teucrians.

b. The Athenians tell a wholly different story. They deny that the Teucrians came from Crete, and record that a certain Teucer, belonging to the deme of Troes, emigrated from Athens to Phrygia; and that Dardanus, Zeus’s son by the Pleiad Electra, and a native of Arcadian Pheneus, was welcomed to Phrygia by this Teucer, not contrariwise. In support of this tradition it is urged that Erichthonius appears in the genealogy both of the Athenian and the Teucrian royal houses. Dardanus, the Athenians go on to say, married Chryse, the daughter of Pallas, who bore him two sons, Idaeus and Deimas. These reigned for a while over the Arcadian kingdom founded by Atlas, but were parted by the calamities of the Deucalionian Flood. Deimas remained in Arcadia, but Idaeus went with his father Dardanus to Samothrace, which they colonized together, the island being thereafter called Dardania. Chryse had brought Dardanus as her dowry the sacred images of the Great Deities whose priestess she was, and he now introduced their cult into Samothrace, though keeping their true names a secret. Dardanus also founded a college of Salian priests to perform the necessary rites; which were the same as those performed by the Cretan Curetes.

c. Grief at the death of his brother Iasion drove Dardanus across sea to the Troad. He arrived alone, paddling a raft made of an inflated skin which he had ballasted with four stones. Teucer received him hospitably and, on condition that he helped to subdue certain neighbouring tribes, gave him a share of the kingdom and married him to the princess Bateia. Some say that this Bateia was Teucer’s aunt; others, that she was his daughter.

d. Dardanus proposed to found a city on the small hill of Ate, which rises from the plain where Troy, or Ilium, now stands; but when an oracle of Phrygian Apollo warned him that misfortune would always attend its inhabitants, he chose a site on the lower slopes of Mount Ida, and named his city Dardania. After Teucer’s death, Dardanus succeeded to the remainder of the kingdom, giving it his own name, and extended his rule over many Asiatic nations; he also sent out colonists to Thrace and beyond.

e. Meanwhile, Dardanus’s youngest son Idaeus had followed him the Troad, bringing the sacred images; which enabled Dardanus to teach his people the Samothracian Mysteries.

An oracle then assured him that the city which he was about to found would remain invincible only so long as his wife’s dowry continued under Athene s protection. His tomb is still shown in that part of Troy which was called Dardania before it merged with the villages of Ileum and Taros into a single city. Ideas settled on the Idea Mountains which, some say, are called after him; and there instituted the worship and Mysteries of the Phrygian Mother of the Gods.

f. According to the Latin tradition, Iasion’s father was the Tyrrhenian prince Corythus; and his twin, Dardanus, the son of Zeus by Corythus’s wife Electra. Both emigrated from Etruria, after dividing these sacred images between them: Iasion went to Samothrace, and Dardanus to the Troad. While battling with the Bebrycians, who tried to throw the Tyrrhenians back into the sea, Dardanus lost his helmet and, although his troops were in retreat, led them back to recover it. This time he was victorious, and founded a city named Corythus on the battle-field in memory of his helmet (corys), as of his father.

g. Idaeus had two elder brothers, Erichthonius and Ilus, or Zacynthius and a daughter, Idaea, who became Phineus’s second wife. When Erichthonius succeeded to the kingdom of Dardanus, he married Astyoche, the daughter of Simoeis, who bore him Tros. Erichthonius, described also as a king of Crete, was the most prosperous of men, in possession of the three thousand mares with which Boreas fell in love. Tros succeeded his father Erichthonius, and not only Troy but the whole Troad took his name. By his wife Callirrhoë, a daughter of Scamander, he became the father of Cleopatra the Younger, Ilus the Younger, Asaracus, and Ganymedes.

i. Meanwhile, Ilus, the brother of Erichthonius had gone to Phrygia, entering for the games which he found in progress, he was victorious in the wrestling match and won fifty youths and fifty maidens as his prize. The Phrygian king (whose name is now forgotten) also gave him a dappled cow, and advised him to found a city wherever she first lie down. Ilus followed her; she lay down on reaching the hill of Ate; and there he built the city of Ilium though, because of the warbling oracle delivered to his father Dardanus, he raised no fortifications. Some, however, say that it was one of Ilus’s own Mysian cows which he followed, and that his instructions came from Apollo. But others hold that Ilium was founded by Locrian immigrants, and that they gave the name of their mountain Phriconis to the Trojan mountain of Cyme.

i. When the circuit of the city boundaries had been marked out, Ilus prayed to Almighty Zeus for a sign, and next morning noticed a wooden object lying in front of his tent, half buried in the earth, and overgrown with weeds. This was the Palladium, a legless image three cubits high, made by Athene in memory of her dead Libyan playmate Pallas. Pallas, whose name Athene added to her own, held a spear aloft in the right hand, and a distaff and spindle in the left; around her breast was wrapped the aegis. Athene had first set up the image on Olympus, beside Zeus’s throne, where it received great honour; but, when Ilus’s great- grandmother, the Pleiad Electra, was violated by Zeus and defiled it with her touch, Athene angrily cast her, with the image, down to earth.

j. Apollo Smintheus now advised Ilus: ‘Preserve the Goddess who fell from the skies, and you will preserve your city: for wherever she goes, she carries empire!’ Accordingly he raised a temple on the citadel to house the image.

k. Some say that the temple was already rising when the image descended from heaven as the goddess’s gift. It dropped through a dart of the roof which had not yet been completed, and was found standing exactly in its proper place. Others say that Electra gave the Palladium to Dardanus, her son by Zeus, and that it was carded from Dardania to Ilium after his death. Others, again, say that it fell from heaven at Athens, and that the Athenian Teucer brought it to the Troad. Still others believe that there were two Palladia, an Athenian and a Trojan, the latter carved from the bones of Pelops, just as the image of Zeus at Olympia was carved from Indian ivory; or, that there were numerous Palladia, all similarly cast from heaven, including the Samothracian images brought to the Troad by Idaeus. The College of Vestals at Rome now guard what is reputed to be the genuine Palladium. No man may look at it with impunity. Once, while it was still in Trojan hands, Ilus rushed to its rescue at an alarm of fire, and was blinded his pains; later, however, he contrived to placate Athene and regained his sight.

l. Eurydice, daughter of Adrastus, bore to Ilus Laomedon, Themiste who married the Phrygian Capys and, some say, the mother of Anchises. By Strymo, a daughter of Scamander and Leucippe, or Zeuxippe, or Thoösa, Laomedon had five sons: Tithonus, Lampus, Clytius, Hicetaon, and Podarces; as well as the daughters: Hesione, Cilla, and Astyoche. He also begot bastard twins on the nymph-shepherdess Calybe. It was he who decided to build famous walls of Troy and was lucky enough to secure the services gods Apollo and Poseidon, then under Zeus’s displeasure for a riot they made against him and forced to serve as day-labourers. Poseidon did the building, while Apollo played the lyre and fed Laomedon’s flocks; and Aeacus the Lelegian lent Poseidon a hand. But Laomedon cheated the gods of their pay and earned their bitter resentment. It was the reason why he and all his sons-except Podarces, now renamed Priam-perished in Heracles’s sack of Troy.

m. Priam, to whom Heracles generously awarded the Trojan throne, surmised that the calamity which had befallen Troy was due to its luckless site, rather than to the anger of the gods. He therefore sent once his nephews to ask the Pythoness at Delphi whether a curse still lay on the hill of Ate. But the priest of Apollo, Panthous the son of Othrias, was so beautiful that Priam’s nephew, forgetting his commission, fell in love with him and carried him back to Troy. Though vexed, Priam had not the heart to punish his nephew. In compensation for the injury done he appointed Panthous priest of Apollo and, ashamed to consult the Pythoness again, rebuilt Troy on the same foundations. Priam’s first wife was Arisbe, a daughter of Merops, the seer. When she had borne him Aesacus, he married her to Hyrtacus, by whom she became the mother of the Hyrtacides: Asius and Nisus.

n. This Aesacus, who learned the art of interpreting dreams from his grandfather Merops, is famous for the great love he showed Asterope, a daughter of the river Cebren: when she died, he tried repeatedly to kill himself by leaping from a sea-cliff until, at last, the gods took pity on his plight. They turned Aesacus into a diving bird, thus allowing him to indulge his obsession with greater decency.

o. Hecabe, Priam’s second wife-whom the Latins call Hecuba - was a daughter of Dymas and the nymph Eunoë; or, some say, of Cisseus and Telecleia; or of the river Sangarius and Metope; or of Glaucippe, the daughter of Xanthus. She bore Priam nineteen of his fifty sons, the remainder being the children of concubines; all fifty occupied adjacent bed- chambers of polished stone. Priam’s twelve daughters slept with their husbands on the farther side of the same courtyard. Hecabe’s eldest son was Hector, whom some call the son of Apollo; next, she bore Paris; then Creusa, Laodice, and Polyxena; then Deiphobus, Helenus, Cassandra, Pammon, Polites, Antiphus, Hipponous, and Polydorus. But Troilus was certainly begotten on her by Apollo.

p. Among Hecabe’s younger children were the twins Cassandra and Helenus. At their birthday feast, celebrated in the sanctuary of Thymbraean Apollo, they grew tired of play and fell asleep in a corner, while their forgetrial parents, who had drunk too much wine, staggered home without them. When Hecabe returned to the temple, she found the sacred serpents licking the children’s ears, and screamed for terror. The serpents at once disappeared into a pile of laurel boughs, but from that hour both Cassandra and Helenus possessed the gift of prophecy.

q. Another account of the matter is that one day Cassandra fell asleep in the temple, Apollo appeared and promised to teach her the art of prophecy if she would lie with him. Cassandra, after accepting his gift, went back on the bargain; but Apollo begged her to give him one kiss and, as she did so, spat into her mouth, thus ensuring that none would ever believe what she prophesied.

r. When, after several years of prudent government, Priam had restored Troy to its former wealth and power, he summoned a Council to discuss the case of his sister Hesione, whom Telamon the Acacid had taken away to Greece. Though he himself was in favour of force, the Council recommended that persuasion should first be tried. His brother-in-law Anterior and his cousin Anchises therefore went to Greece and delivered the Trojan demands to the assembled Greeks at Telamon’s court; but were scornfully sent about their business. The incident was a main cause of the Trojan War, the gloomy end of which Cassandra was now already predicting. To avoid scandal, Priam locked her up in a pyramidal building on the citadel; the guardians cared for her had orders to keep him informed of all her prophesised utterances.

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1. The situation of Troy on a well-watered plain at the entrance to the Hellespont, though establishing it as the main centre of Bronze Age trade between East and West, provoked frequent attacks from all quarters. Greek, Cretan, and Phrygian claims to have founded the city were not irreconcilable, since by Classical times it had been destroyed and rebuilt often enough: there were ten Troys in all, the seventh being the Homeric city. The Troy with which Homer is concerned seems to have been peopled by a federation of three tribes-Trojans, Ilians, and Dardanians-a usual arrangement in the Bronze Age.

2. ‘ Sminthian Apollo’ points to Crete, sminthos being the Cretan word for ‘mouse’, a sacred animal not only at Cnossus, but in Philistia and Phocis; and Erichthonins, the  fertilizing North Wind, was worshipped alike by the Pelasgians of Athens and the Thracians. But the Athenian claim to have founded Troy may be dismissed as political propaganda. The white mice kept in Apollo’s temples were prophylactic both against plague and against sudden invasions of mice such as Aelian (History of Animals) and Aristotle (History of Animals) mention. Dardanus may have been a Tyrrhenian from Lydia or Samothrace; but Servius errs in recording that he came from Etruria, where the Tyrrhenians settled long after the Trojan War. ‘Zacinthus’, a Cretan word, figuring in the Trojan royal pedigree, was the name of an island belonging to Odysseus’s kingdom; and this suggests that he claimed hereditary rights at Troy.

3. The Palladium, which the Vestal Virgins guarded at Rome, as the luck of the city, held immense importance for Italian mythographers; they claimed that it had been rescued from Troy by Aeneas (Pausanias) and brought to Italy. It was perhaps made of porpoise-ivory. ‘Palladium’ means a stone or other cult-object around which the girls of a particular clan danced, as at Thespiae, or young men leaped, pallas being used indiscriminately for both sexes. The Roman College of Salios was a society of leaping priests. When such cult-objects became identified with tribal prosperity and were carefully guarded against theft or mutilation, palladio was read as meaning palta, ‘things hurled from heaven’. Palta might not be hidden from the sky; thus the sacred thunder-stone of Terminus at Rome stood under a hole in the  roof of Juppiter’s temple-which accounts for the similar opening at Troy.

4. Worship of meteorites was easily extended to ancient monoliths, the funerary origin of which had been forgotten; then from monolith to stone image, and from stone image to wooden or ivory image is a short step. But the falling of a shield from heaven-Mars’s ancile (Ovid: Fasti) is the best-known instance-needs more explanation. At first, meteorites, as the only genuine palta, were taken to be the origin of lightning, which splits forest trees. Next, Neolithic stone axes, such as the one recently found in the Mycenaean sanctuary of Asine,  and early Bronze Age celts or pestles, such as Cybele’s pestle at Ephesus, were mistaken for thunderbolts. But the shield was also a thunder instrument. Pre-Hellenic rain-makers summoned storms by whirling bull-roarers to imitate the sound of rising wind and, for thunder, beat on huge, tightly-stretched ox-hide shields, with double-headed drum-sticks like those carried by the Solion priests in the Anagni relief. The only way to keep a bull-roarer sounding continuously is to whirl it in a figure of eight, as boys do with toy wind-mills, and since torches, used to imitate lightning, were, it seems, whirled in the same pattern, the rain- making shield was cut to form a figure-of-eight, and the double drum-stick beat continuously on both sides. This is why surviving Cretan icons show the Thunder-spirit descending as a figure-of-eight shield; and why therefore ancient shields were eventually worshipped as palta. A painted limestone tablet from the Acropolis at Mycenae proves, by the colour of the flesh, that the Thunder-spirit was a goddess, rather than a god; on a gold ring found near by, the sex of the descending shield is not indicated.

5. Cassandra and the serpents recall the myth of Melampus, and Apollo’s spitting into her mouth that of Glaucus. Her prison was probably a bee-hive tomb from which she uttered prophecies in the name of the hero who lay buried there.

6. Aesacus, the name of Priam’s prophetic son, meant the myrtle-branch which was passed around at Greek banquets as a challenge to sing or compose. Myrtle being a death-tree, such poems may originally have been prophecies made at a hero-feast. The diving bird was sacred to Athene in Attica and associated with the drowning of the royal pharmacos). Scamander’s leaping into the river Xanthus must refer to a similar Trojan custom of drowning the old king; his ghost supposedly impregnated girls when they came there to bathe. Tantalus, who appears to have suffered the same fate, married Xanthus’s daughter.

7. Priam had fifty sons, nineteen of whom were legitimate; this suggests that at Troy the length of the king’s reign was governed by the nineteen-year metonic cycle, not the cycle of one hundred lunations shared between king and tanist, as in Crete and Arcadia. His twelve daughters were perhaps guardians of the months.

8. The importance of Aeacus’s share in building the walls of Troy should not be overlooked: Apollo had prophesied that his descendants should be present at its capture both in the first and the fourth generation, and only the part built by Aeacus could be breached (Pindar: Pythian Odes). Andromache reminded Hector that this part was the curtain on the west side of the wall ‘near the fig tree,’ where the city might be most easily assailed (Homer: Iliad), and ‘where the most valiant men who follow the two Ajax’s have thrice attempted to force an entry-whether some soothsayer has revealed the secret to them, or whether their own spirit urges them on.’ Dorpfeld’s excavations of Troy proved that the wall was, unaccountably, weakest at this point; but the Ajax’s or ‘Aeacans’ needed no soothsayer to inform them of this if, as Polybius suggests, ‘Aeacus’ came from Little Ajax’s city of Opuntian Locris. Locris, which seems to have provided the Ilian element in Homeric Troy, and enjoyed the privilege of nominating Trojan priestesses, was a pre-Hellenic Lelegian district with matrilineal and even matriarchal institutions; another tribe of Lelegians, perhaps of Locrian descent, lived at Pedasus in the Troad. One of their princesses, Laothoë, came to Troy and had a child by Priam (Homer: Iliad). It seems to have been the Locrian priestesses’ readiness to smuggle away the Palladium to safety in Locris that facilitated the Greeks’ capture of the city.

9. Since one Teucer was Scamander’s son, and another was Aeacus’s grandson and son of Priam’s sister Hesione, the Teucrian element at Troy may be identified with the Lelegian, or Aeacan, or Ilian; the other two elements being the Lydian, or Dardanian, or Tyrrhenian; and the Trojan, or Phrygian.